


Like History, We Repeat Our Mistakes

by vials



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Car Accidents, Gen, Major Character Injury, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 08:15:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15481506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Charles isn't arrested the night he decides to drive drunk. What happens instead is much more terrible, and in the chaotic aftermath everyone is forced to realise that some things will always catch up to them.





	Like History, We Repeat Our Mistakes

**Author's Note:**

> Very brief dialogue at the beginning and brief dialogue at the end is directly from the book; the rest (and the narrative framing that dialogue) is my own.

I was woken not long after I had finally managed to fall asleep, and for a long moment I couldn’t think what had woken me. Only when a knocking at the door came again, this time rather insistent, did I realise what it must have been. Blinking, I reached for my watch, squinting through the dark to see its face. It was, apparently, three o’clock in the morning, and my foul mood only deepened.

“Who’s there?” I snapped. I had half a mind to refuse to open the door, regardless of who it might be.

“Henry,” came the surprising reply, and despite myself I got up.

I was shocked at the sight of him. Briefly I wondered if he was sick again; his face had the same pale clamminess to it, and he was distracted, the way he always was when trying to keep himself upright in the face of such pain. However, he was quite steady on his feet as he stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. 

“Get changed,” he said, rather businesslike, and crossed the room to stare out of the window, hands clasped behind his back. “I’m afraid something rather urgent has come up.”

“What?” I asked, not moving. My mind ran away with me, and no possible explanation I could come up with was one I liked to linger on for long.

“Please,” Henry said, and rather than formal politeness I detected in this word a note of genuine pleading, which shocked me. “I’m afraid we may not have long.”

This did nothing to calm my nerves. Not daring to turn on a light, I rummaged around for a change of clothing, so preoccupied by what could have possibly happened that I had no qualms about stripping off with Henry standing only feet away, still staring out of the window as though keeping watch. I pulled a shirt on, feeling my heart thudding in my chest, and while I told myself I wouldn’t ask more questions I couldn’t help myself.

“Do I need to bring… anything?” I asked, suddenly unsure – or perhaps unable – to word it. “Anything… legal?”

“Legal?” Henry asked, turning to blink at me. 

“Like, I don’t know. Identification. Passport. That kind of thing.”

His look of confusion cleared. “No. That won’t be necessary. It’s not that kind of problem.”

A wave of relief rushed over me before more worries clouded my thoughts again. If it wasn’t something to do with Bunny’s death, I had no idea what could have happened. Surely, I told myself, it couldn’t be _that_ bad? Henry had a flair for the dramatic, it had to be said – what could be settled in the morning could often become a late night visit or phone call, if it was preoccupying him enough, and it was a known fact – one Francis pointed out often – that Henry seemed to forget that other people did, occasionally, sleep. Out of all of us, I would have been the best person to drop in on at such a strange time, though Henry had been uncharacteristically unapologetic when he had seen I had clearly been sleeping.

I was changed, and without any further explanation Henry stepped around me and went to the door. Shoving my feet in my shoes I followed him, out of the room and down the hall, through the doors and out into air so fresh that it seemed stunning, so convinced I had been that I might be dreaming. I could hear the low murmur of an engine running, and as we walked around the back of the building I spotted Francis in his car, drumming a finger impatiently on the steering wheel and occasionally peering out of the passenger side window. When he saw us he seemed to freeze, as though suddenly and unhappily reminded of something. 

We climbed in without a word, Henry in the front beside Francis, me in the back in the middle. Francis pulled away and we remained silent until we had joined some of the main roads, the only light coming from Francis’s headlights. 

“What—?” I finally asked, but Henry interrupted, staring straight ahead. 

“There’s been a terrible accident,” he said, his tone so even and flat that it took me a moment to catch up with what he had said. “Charles has been severely hurt. He’s in the hospital.”

“Charles—” I started, and then changed track. “Where’s Camilla?”

“She’s already with him,” Francis answered, and his voice, I heard, was wavering. Looking at him, I saw his knuckles seemed to glow white as he gripped the steering wheel. “She went with the police, straight to the hospital.”

“How bad is it?” I asked, now leaning so far forward I was practically in the front seat. “Is he going to be alright?”

The two of them were uncomfortably silent. I felt a sudden sense of dread wash over me, not unlike the kind I suppose one should get when such an event is occurring in real time, like all of those stories I’d read about in those gossipy real-life magazines my mother used to love so much. There was always at least one of them in there, some mother who knew the moment her daughter had been murdered, or some wife who collapsed in shock at work only to find out it was the exact same moment as her husband collapsed from a heart attack at his own workplace. The sense of dread I felt then, sudden and overwhelming, something I could practically taste, seemed by those accounts late. 

“Is he going to be alright?” I asked again, my mouth suddenly dry. There was a solid ten seconds of silence before Henry spoke, but it wasn’t to answer my question.

“Not this way, Francis. We’ll have to—”

“There isn’t any other way,” Francis broke in. “The roadworks are up on the bridge until next week. It’s closed from nine in the evening until four in the morning, we won’t get through.”

“Are you sure there’s no other way?” Henry’s voice sounded pained. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for any of us to—”

“Maybe if Camilla was with us I’d think about going cross-country,” Francis replied, “but right now I can’t think of another way. Is this really the time for us to be driving around aimlessly, when we don’t know if—”

“Yes, yes,” Henry interrupted quickly. “Alright.”

“Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” I demanded, but it turned out I wouldn’t need them to. 

I could see the blue lights up ahead, flashing lazily on our side of the road. It was a main road, two lanes in each direction, and as Francis slowed I saw someone was standing on the outside line, waving a light to signal we move over. Francis indicated and did so, slowing right down as he passed the people in the road. There were several patrol cars, lights flashing, and a fire crew was packing equipment into a truck. I twisted around in my seat as we passed, and in the dull red-and-blue lights spotted, at the bottom of the verge and wrapped around a tree, looking like less like a vehicle and more like scrap metal, a flash of white.

“Is that—?” I asked, and Henry gave a small sigh.

“Yes,” he said. “I did like that car.”

 

 

The hospital was all garish bright lights and white walls and floors, and after the darkness from outside I found myself squinting. I had never particularly liked hospitals, always associating them with scenes like this: late night confusion, dread growing in my chest, the desperate need for answers alongside the knowledge that there would be none, not until they were ready to appear. 

Henry approached the desk, but I didn’t hear what he said, as I hung back with Francis. He looked about as pale as the walls, his red hair striking against the colour of his face, and quite suddenly I remembered that he was terrified of hospitals, and doctors, and only a night ago had we been here. He gave me a wide-eyed look, and I returned it with a small nod, as though reassuring him I wouldn’t bring it up.

Henry approached us, still looking pale but not as stricken as he had appeared while in my room. He pushed his glasses up his nose, a slight frown of annoyance on his face.

“My goodness,” he said, “they do want your entire life story here.”

We began to follow him down a hallway leading off from the emergency room – in the opposite direction, I noted to Francis’s relief, from any doctors who might have seen him the other night. 

“I’m surprised they let us in,” he said to Henry, who gave a small shake of his head.

“I thought for a moment they weren’t going to. Just family, they said, and apparently it’s a strict rule. Well, I explained that Camilla is his sister, and that they’re orphans, and that their other relatives are at least twelve hours’ travel away, and so she decided to be so kind as to let us sit in the family waiting area. I’m not sure if Camilla will be there, though.”

“Did she tell you anything about Charles? The nurse?”

Henry shook his head again. “No. She’s not allowed to tell non-family members anything like that. No one is. Though Camilla can tell us any information she chooses to. Again, though, I have no idea if she’ll even be there.”

She was, however, and it was a terrible sight to behold. She seemed so much smaller; _younger_ , even, pressed into a chair in the corner with her knees drawn up under her chin. She was in her nightdress and a pair of slip-on shoes that I thought were Charles’s, and to my added confusion, the large coat wrapped around her shoulders was Henry’s. Her hair was a mess, sticking up in tufts at the back and swept against her parting at the front, as though she had been constantly tugging at it; her eyes, I noticed when she looked up, were swollen and red. It took her a moment to recognise us, and when she did she let out a small cry and jumped up, going straight to Henry. To my surprise he put his arms around her and, as she clung there, quickly pressed a kiss to the top of her head. I glanced at Francis, who either hadn’t noticed or wasn’t surprised. Henry whispered something to her and she nodded; they held one another for a moment more and then returned to Camilla’s corner, Henry sitting beside her while Francis and I took seats at a right angle to them, facing the empty row against the other wall. 

“You didn’t all have to come,” Camilla eventually said. Her voice was level, but the strain in her tone told me it was an effort for her to keep it that way. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“We could hardly leave you here on your own,” Francis said. 

“Do you know what happened?” she asked, first looking at Francis and then at me. For a strange moment I thought she was asking us to tell _her_ ; only when Francis answered did I realise.

“Well, a little,” he said, delicately. “There was… an accident.” 

“How much did you tell them?” Camilla asked, turning to Henry. 

“Not much,” Henry replied. “The basics, I suppose.”

“He was drunk,” Camilla said suddenly, and perhaps, I thought, not exactly kindly. “I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise. He’s drunk a lot these days. But I never thought… oh, Hell. What was he thinking?”

“I don’t think he was thinking,” Henry said. “I believe that was the problem.”

“Why did he have your car?” I asked, and Henry and Camilla exchanged a look.

“You may as well just tell them,” Camilla said. “They’re probably going to find out in the blasted investigation anyway.”

Henry explained in the same flat, almost detached way as he had broken the news to me in the first place. I had heard him say some extraordinary things in this tone, but somehow, though I always thought it should, it never failed to shield the enormity of the words. 

“There was an argument,” he said, reciting the facts in the same manner as he delivered his impromptu lectures on various topics, “and Camilla was staying with me. Well, I suppose Charles got it into his head that he didn’t like that, or perhaps he wanted to smooth things over, I’m not sure. Either way, he showed up, and there was another argument. I won’t get into the specifics. He stormed out, and apparently helped himself to my car keys on his way. I only realised when I heard him screeching away from the sidewalk – taking a side mirror from one of my neighbour’s cars with him, might I add. Well, we supposed he’d blow off steam and either come back later or take the car back to his place, but I suppose we didn’t realise how drunk he was.”

“We knew he was _drunk_ ,” Camilla put in, “but… well, it’s like I said, isn’t it? That’s not unusual for him, and he didn’t seem to be any drunker than usual. He certainly didn’t seem to be swaying around or anything. I know he _shouldn’t_ do it but he had done it before, with no problems. And I thought, it’s the middle of the night. Who could he possibly crash into?”

“No one,” Henry said, before adding, “thankfully. But it was still a nasty smash. They think he was just going too fast for the bend. It’s a gentle one, but if you’re going too fast you could easily slide. Anyway, the police found my address from running the plates, and came to tell us.”

“Jesus,” Francis said, slumped in his seat slightly. “Is he going to be alright?”

Camilla gave a small smile and shrugged one of her shoulders, but her eyes glistened again.

“Well,” Henry said, a little uncomfortable now, “to be honest, that’s why we’re all here. They don’t know.”

 

 

Truth be told, I don’t remember much of the following few days. They were all a blur of stress and sleep deprivation, of not knowing anything and not knowing when we would find out. For the most part we spent the rest of the night and most of the next day in the waiting room, with the only news being that Charles had made it out of surgery alive. Camilla was going to be able to see him, but then something – I’m still not sure what – went wrong and he was rushed back into surgery; this one, according to Camilla, one he almost didn’t survive. He was going to be transferred as soon as possible to another, larger hospital, which happened towards the middle of the afternoon. Camilla was allowed to go with him, with the rest of us promising to collect some of her things and follow. Her grandmother, accompanied by one of Camilla’s uncles, was already on route. 

“I don’t know if she should have made the trip,” Camilla said, during our hurried goodbye. She pressed the key to the apartment into Henry’s hand as she hugged him. “She’s so old. This is a terrible shock.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Henry assured her. “Just worry about Charles. We’ll catch up in a few hours.”

She stepped back, still looking so tiny in her nightdress and oversized coat, and nodded. “I’ll see you soon.”

Suddenly she was gone, and the three of us were left standing in the waiting room, stunned and silent and exhausted. Francis yawned and sat down heavily, the side of his face creased from where he had been laying with his head resting on his arm, trying to nap on the empty chairs. Somewhere, a clock ticked.

“We should probably leave,” Henry said, and Francis yawned again. “It’s a long drive.”

“You don’t mind, do you, Henry?” Francis asked, standing, as we headed for the door. “I’d probably pass out, and that’s really the last thing we need.”

 

 

Of course, I knew it had been serious. I knew, theoretically, that it had been a close call. I had seen the wreckage as we had passed it, I had been there when Camilla had told us that he was being rushed into surgery again. I had experienced the deathly quiet of the waiting room as the minutes had turned to hours; I had seen how Camilla had drawn herself smaller and smaller, as though waiting for an inevitable, soul-crushing blow that thankfully never came. I had seen in her eyes, the fact that she was struggling between hoping for the best and letting her brother go now, before the news could surprise her – as though if she accepted his death in advance, it wouldn’t hurt as much when it came. 

Charles, thankfully, did not die. I knew it was a possibility, I knew it was something that we should prepare ourselves for, but somehow none of this made sense until later, when I would get to see him for the first time. Due to the nature of his injuries, that wouldn’t be for many months – the intensive care unit was strictly family-only. 

Everything was turned on its head for those few months. The larger hospital was several hours of driving away, and Camilla stayed close by with her grandmother and uncle. The three of us would make trips at least once a week, more for practical support than anything else, and Henry – unknown to Camilla’s grandmother and uncle, as they would never accept it otherwise – was paying for the hotel the three of them were staying in, with Camilla cashing the checks he gave her into her own account and telling them that they were savings. 

Camilla’s grandmother was a lovely woman, and I could see traces of both the twins in her. It was clear she had been their primary caregiver when they had been growing up; she was as devastated as any mother would have been, but retained traces of the classic grandmother, always asking us if we needed anything to eat, or if we were warm enough, and – heartbreakingly, I thought – apologising profusely for Henry’s car, despite his telling her that it really didn’t matter. It seemed she was so desperate to fix something of the situation that that was all she could think about, and in the end Henry resorted to telling her that he had been about to get a new one anyway, so terrified he was that she would actually try to buy him one herself. 

Camilla’s uncle was quieter, something of Charles in the way he could be rather brooding, but under the circumstances it was understandable. He was often quiet, sometimes sullen, though he always managed to be polite when we were around. Camilla told us later that he was the one angrier at Charles – it was evident now that Charles had been very drunk, both through anecdotal evidence and blood tests, and in actual fact he hadn’t been just a little drunk at all, like his uncle and grandmother had hoped. Camilla said that they had been clinging to the theory that Charles had maybe had one too many and thought he would be fine (to save him from further legal trouble, Henry had told the police he had consented to Charles borrowing his car), but the results of the blood tests showed that there was no way on earth he could have thought he was alright to drive. Henry got out of that one thanks to the police’s opinion that Charles was probably an alcoholic, plus the fact that for some unknown reason, the police always seemed to think the best of Henry. 

“You never know with alchos,” the moustachioed cop had apparently told Henry, quite jovially. “They can hold their drink like a mean bastard. Could have enough alcohol in them to kill a horse and you wouldn’t know it.”

“It’s because you look so proper,” Francis had said, when Henry had regaled us with this encounter. “Someone like you, knowingly letting someone drink drive? Of course not.”

“But I did,” Henry said quietly, and the tone had alarmed me. Looking at him as he said it, I saw he was hunched over slightly, gripping a cigarette between his fingers that had close to an inch of ash burning at the end, worryingly near his fingers.

“Henry,” I said warningly, and he started, as though only just noticing it was there in the first place. 

 

 

Julian, for his part, had other matters to be concerned about on top of the obvious.

“Do you know when Camilla might be coming back?” he asked us, after a month had passed and she was still not in attendance. “She _is_ coming back, of course?”

“Probably when Charles is more stable,” Henry answered. “He’s still in intensive care.”

“Good grief,” Julian said, a brief flicker of pain crossing his face as he allowed himself to remember it. “This will be soon, I hope? He’s making some recovery?”

“They don’t know when, exactly,” Henry said, “but he is getting steadily better. They’re sure he’ll survive now, though there may be complications.”

“Nothing permanent, I hope?” 

“His legs were badly shattered,” Henry said evenly, but I saw the way he moved his own slightly as he spoke, as though wanting to tuck them closer to himself but resisting at the last moment. 

 

 

It was another month and a half after this that we were able to see Charles, who was now in a regular ward. I thought it would be more of a relief than it was, but I found myself uncharacteristically anxious, despite Camilla’s reassurances that he was still _Charles_. I don’t know what I expected – perhaps some kind of catastrophic brain damage, despite being told that he had escaped such a thing – but for some reason I couldn’t allow myself to see it so simply. Perhaps I was subconsciously picking up on the tension that, with hindsight, I knew to be there already. I have no idea, but I have not done anything since that registers anywhere near how nerve-wracking seeing Charles for the first time since the accident was.

Henry, to my surprise, didn’t come to the hospital, preferring to stay at the hotel.

“He has a headache,” Camilla told her grandmother and uncle, when they asked. “He gets bad ones sometimes.”

I knew this to be a lie, considering I had been sharing a room with him and had seen him just a few minutes before, perfectly well and alert, reading at the table beside the window. Of course I didn’t say anything then, but I did question Camilla as we made our way out.

“Why did Henry say he had a headache?”

Camilla gave a small shrug. “Things are still tense between he and Charles.”

“After everything that’s happened?”

“It was a very terrible argument,” Camilla said, and I exchanged a look with Francis, who gave a helpless shrug of his own. 

I had had horrible ideas of having to go in alone, but thankfully that wasn’t the case. When we saw Charles it was the three of us, with Camilla’s grandmother and uncle excusing themselves to the cafeteria for a coffee and to let us have some time to catch up. I wasn’t sure what I had expected; somehow Charles looked both better and worse than I had thought. I wondered how terrible he must have looked in those early days; every inch of exposed skin was green or yellow with bruises that were still fading, and I wondered what they must have looked like when they had been fresh, every inch of him black and purple. The shadows of the bruises on his face were still purple around the edges, letting me know that he must have been nearly unrecognisable. A small section of his hair was shaved and I could see stitches there; the more I looked, the more I spotted several other areas where stitches criss-crossed his skin – from the glass, I supposed. 

The worst part of him to look at were his legs. They were both encased in some kind of metal device that appeared to fasten into the bones themselves, like cages with the screws vanishing into his leg. Even with the amount of surgery he had had on them they still looked wrong, slightly crooked and lumpy in ways they hadn’t been before. His right ankle, I saw to my horror, had a mess of stitches going all the way around it; I later heard from Henry that apparently his right foot had been ripped almost clean off, and had only survived thanks to a thin strip of skin and muscle. It was a miracle he still had a foot to speak of. 

The most dangerous injuries, there was no evidence of. I supposed he would have scarring visible when shirtless, but right now there was no evidence of the internal lacerations that had nearly killed him. Aside from his looking a little pale, I could forget he had come within minutes of bleeding to death. 

“My word,” Francis said, looking around the small room, “they’re not exactly encouraging you to embrace life in here, are they?”

Thankfully his comment broke the ice. The room was pleasant for a hospital room, but I could understand where Francis was coming from. The idea of being stuck in here, day after day, unable to walk, was a horrifying one. 

“Better than the ICU,” Charles said. “All that beeping, I barely got a wink of sleep.”

“You were awake in there?” I asked, surprised. “I thought you were in a coma.”

“I was, apparently,” Charles replied. “There’s different stages of it, or something. You’re not always knocked out. It’s awful. Like being stuck in a dream that you’re half awakening from. I could hear people talking to me but I couldn’t reply or respond. I was terrified they were going to decide to switch off the machines and I wouldn’t be able to stop them.”

“You know we wouldn’t have done that,” Camilla told him, and he gave her a smile which I noted was oddly fond, at least compared to the way they had been looking at one another in the weeks leading up to Charles’s accident.

“I know, Milly. I know that _now_. But at the time anything seemed possible.”

“What’s the prognosis?” Francis asked, looking at Charles’s legs with a mixture of horror and fascination. “This doesn’t look so good.”

“Well, it’s going to be slow and painful, that’s for sure,” Charles said, and I had no idea how he seemed so casual about it. “They think I should walk again, eventually, but it’s going to be a while.”

“How long?” I asked.

“They think a year, until I’m able to walk any real distance,” Charles said, “and even then I’ll likely need crutches. Once I get to that point it’ll be a case of practise, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to walk normally. I’ll have a limp on my right side, and there’ll probably always be some level of discomfort.”

“You sound awfully alright with that,” Francis said.

“I’ll probably get annoyed later,” Charles said, looking down at his legs with a thoughtful expression. “But to be honest with you, right now I’m just happy it wasn’t worse.” He looked up again, and suddenly frowned. “Though, I suppose I’m in a fair bit of trouble as it is. Say, where’s Henry?”

“He’s still at the hotel,” Camilla said, and to my surprise she didn’t keep up the lie. “I think he wondered if it would be appropriate to visit you, considering the two of you weren’t exactly on the best of terms that night.”

“Well, I suppose not,” Charles said, looking a little embarrassed. “How much do you know?” he asked of Francis and I.

“Not much,” I said, still a little frustrated by the whole thing. “Just that there was a fight, but no details.”

“Well,” Charles said again, “probably for the best. Do you know I barely remember the details now? It was probably something ridiculous. I know I was in a foul mood.”

“Whatever it was, it was serious enough for you to steal his car and crash it because you were drunk,” Camilla said, a little coolly, and I was shocked at this, too. I had been, I suppose, under the impression that when someone nearly dies it’s polite to simply let bygones be bygones, but apparently Camilla wasn’t from the same school of thought. I would have thought Charles had learned his lesson and that would have been enough – not to mention the legal trouble he was still facing – but Camilla seemed to disagree and, to my further surprise, Charles at least made the effort to look contrite. 

“Yes, well,” he muttered, his cheeks reddening slightly. “That was stupid of me, I know that. I’m awfully sorry about his car, and I would like to tell him that.”

“I can pass on that you would like to see him,” Camilla said, “and I think it would benefit the both of you if you could have serious discussion about all of this. He’s done a lot for us. For you.”

“He has?” Charles asked, looking guilty.

“He told the police that he let you borrow his car,” Camilla said, and Charles’s guilty look deepened, “so you can avoid the charges of theft, which would have been serious. He almost got into trouble for it, too. They wanted to know why he would have done it if he knew you were drunk, but he managed to persuade them that he didn’t think you were. They way he told it, you just dropped by and pleasantly asked if you could use it. Now you’re looking at a fine and a driving ban, rather than prison time.”

Charles was shifting slightly, looking more and more uncomfortable with every word. “Yes. Well. That was… that was very good of him. I’ll be sure to mention it to him.”

The rest of the visit passed pleasantly, until the very end when we had said our goodbyes and were filing out of the room. For a moment I had thought I hadn’t heard it at all, but a glance at Francis – stricken, his ears burning red – told me I hadn’t misheard. Camilla had been the last out, and as we had left the room I had heard Charles speak quietly to her. 

“There are still some other things I need to discuss with Henry, you know. This doesn’t change what he did.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Camilla whispered back, her voice harsh, “have you not made your annoyance known?” 

“My _annoya_ —”

“Perhaps,” Camilla said, her voice low and dangerously controlled, “if you had just stormed off I could have forgiven it, but you had to do _this_. Of all the ways you could have almost killed yourself, it had to be _this way_. And for what?”

The door swung shut behind us; with another glance, Francis and I – quite shamelessly, might I add – pressed our ears up against it, just in time to hear the end of Camilla’s sentence.

“Whatever happened wasn’t because Henry was some sort of evil mastermind trying to frame you,” she hissed. “It was because you seemed to _think_ he knew everything when really he was just as lost as the rest of us, and you expected him to know how to fix it, and when he couldn’t live up to the expectation he didn’t even know you had of him, you decided it was all intentional. Where’s the logic in that?”

“Milly, _really_!”

“Don’t _Milly_ me! Whatever it is, the two of you had better sort it out. This family has had enough of—of _this_ kind of thing!” 

To my horror her voice suddenly sounded thick. Francis and I leapt away from the door just in time; it swung open and Camilla marched out, her eyes shining. She saw us, and if she thought we were slightly too close to the door she didn’t mention it. She simply gave us an incredibly formal nod, blinked rapidly, and then made quickly for the bathrooms. 

 

 

Henry didn’t seem surprised when I told him of the events later. I hadn’t wanted to, but the conversation and the reaction had weighed heavily on my mind, and I knew he wouldn’t be fooled in the slightest if I tried to play it casually. I wasn’t Henry; I couldn’t outsmart him in such matters, and I wasn’t nearly as adept at covering up things that troubled me. Perhaps if he had been an ordinary evening in Hampden I could have gotten away with it, but the truth was we were stuck in a hotel room together for the night, neither of us great sleepers, and to my great annoyance I had found myself coming out with it before the clock had even stuck ten. 

“Well, of course she would say that,” he said, leaning back in his chair and looking out of the window, though it was so dark outside that he could surely only see the room repeated back at him. I watched his reflection, and quite suddenly his eyes met mine, mirrored in the glass as though he knew I had been doing it all along. “I suppose you do know how Charles and Camilla’s parents died?”

“A car accident,” I said, and once again the unfairness of it all struck me. “Though I don’t know the details.”

“Nor do I,” Henry said, “and I don’t think it prudent to ask. But from what I’ve pieced together, it was a genuine accident. Their parents weren’t drunk or driving recklessly. It was just one of those terrible things. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Charles and Camilla have always been nervous travelling since then, and who can blame them?” He paused for a moment, blinking slowly at me in the glass, and then he looked elsewhere, as though something outside had managed to catch his attention. “I suppose it must feel like an insult. Camilla has already lost her parents in such a tragedy, and then for Charles to willingly put himself in danger by driving both drunk and recklessly? I suppose she must see it as especially cruel.”

I nodded, unsure of what to say to that. I suppose nothing could be said. It was all true, after all. To do such a thing would be thoughtless even at the best of times, but with such a thing hanging over their heads I found it difficult to understand Charles’s logic. The twins had been very young when their parents had died, I knew – infants, really – and had therefore been protected from the rawer kind of grief. But they had certainly grown up grieving, with two large holes in their lives where a mother and father should have been. They clearly loved their grandmother dearly, and had a good relationship with their other family members, but the loss was still imprinted on them deeply and permanently. 

“To lose one parent,” Henry said, so quietly I was for a moment unsure I had heard him, “is tragic enough. But to lose two at the same time, I can’t imagine it. To then almost lose a brother – and a twin, too – in the exact same fashion? Camilla must have had the fright of her life.”

“She was angry, too,” I said. “That’s what shocked me. I didn’t think she would be so angry when he had come so close to dying. Not until later, anyway.”

“I can understand it. It would have been an almost voluntary abandonment, had he died. He knew what he was doing was dangerous, and he made the choice.”

“Not just about that,” I said, now looking at him properly, no longer as a reflection. “She was angry about something to do with the two of you. You and Charles.”

Henry met my gaze and gave another slow, uncomprehending blink. “Well, we did argue,” he said. 

“What about?” I asked, and of course Henry’s face gave nothing away.

“Do you know, it’s not all that clear anymore?” he asked, but for once I wasn’t fooled. 

“Something about you trying to frame Charles,” I said, aware of my heart thudding, “or at least, that was the impression he was under.”

Henry stared at me for a moment longer, and then slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He was silent as he took one out, replaced the packet, found his matches, and lit the cigarette. Only when he had put the matches away did he speak again, somewhat hesitantly.

“Things were slightly more difficult for Charles than either of us really let on to the rest of you,” he said, looking out of the window again. “I’m not sure of the details, but Charles was in a rather unfortunate position for a while. That wasn’t my intention, of course,” he said, quickly glancing at me as though making sure I believed him, “but you can understand why he might have felt that way. It all worked out fine in the end, obviously, but while I saw that as cause to relax Charles was rather upset by it. I think he realised just how far outside our control it had gotten by that point, and perhaps resents me for not foreseeing it.” He ashed the cigarette and looked at me again, a thin, humourless smile on his face. “Of course, had I been able to foresee it, I would never have put him in that position. I thought that went without saying. Apparently not. He seemed to think I was trying to frame him, and that, I suppose, was the crook of the argument we had that night.”

I got the impression that wasn’t all of it, but I knew better than to pry. The fact I had gotten this much out of him was a miracle; any further questioning and I was sure he would close right back up. 

“Nasty business,” Henry said, “but certainly not worth killing yourself over.”

“You don’t think he did that _on purpose_?” I asked, stunned.

“Oh, of course not,” Henry said, shaking his head. “But really, what did he expect?”

 

 

Before I knew it, it was the end of the year. I had known it was coming, somewhere in the back of my mind, but between everything that had happened it had often slipped from my thoughts. I only remembered because Julian mentioned it – Camilla had managed to show up for our last class, though mostly it was so she could catch Julian after it to work out just what she was going to do about the missed work. Charles, of course, wouldn’t be returning until the next year, if at all, and as for the rest of us we were all about to head our separate ways. Camilla would now potentially be a year ahead of her brother; Francis and I had another year left, but to my surprise I found out that Henry had missed a year somewhere during his schooling and had managed to arrive at Hampden early, meaning that despite being the same age as Francis and I, he was in his final year.

“You didn’t mention that,” I told him.

“It didn’t come up,” he replied. 

“It’s certainly going to be strange,” Julian put in. “I was hoping to see you all together at least once before the end of the year, but I suppose it can’t be helped. I’m just relieved that Camilla is back. It was getting awfully unnerving, seeing one less of you what felt like every time I came in here. I was starting to think we were under some kind of curse. To think there’ll only be four of you next year! Possibly even three. I can’t imagine it, though I daresay I’ll still be seeing a fair bit of you, Henry.”

“Most likely,” Henry agreed, with a small smile.

“I do still really think you should come back as a postgraduate. It would be nice to have you around, and I don’t get postgraduate students often.” He paused, and then laughed. “And by that I of course mean never. But I suppose one step at a time. Do you think Charles will be coming back, Camilla?”

“He intends to,” Camilla said, “if he can. It’s really all about how mobile he is by then. There are an awful lot of stairs to get up here.”

“Goodness,” Julian said, “you can’t imagine I’d make him walk all the way up here? I daresay we’d have to set up shop somewhere else, but it would be worth it to have him back.”

There was a certain tension in Camilla’s voice when she spoke of Charles, I noticed, but it was at least a little softer than it had been in the immediate aftermath of when Francis and I had overheard outside the hospital room. I sincerely hoped they were working things through. What Henry had said in the hotel room the night it had happened had weighed on me, and I often found myself distraught, thinking about how terrible it would be if the twins’ relationship was wounded so deeply by this that they lost each other anyway. As for Charles and Henry, I wasn’t sure what was going on; Henry, of course, was giving nothing away. 

“I should have known you would be back this morning, Camilla,” Julian was saying, as I tuned back in. “It’s been a very odd kind of morning, and such days usually remain so, don’t they? Full of surprises.”

“What kind of surprises?” asked Francis. He sounded a little worried, but that wasn’t unusual for him. Any threat of the unexpected could often send him into dramatic imaginings of the worst case scenario, though this time, regrettably, he was right to be concerned. 

“Well, the _strangest_ thing happened this morning,” Julian said, going over to his desk. We all exchanged glances as he rummaged around in a pile of papers, and then returned, holding a sheaf of them. “This letter,” he said, giving them a small shake, “which was meant for me, somehow wound up in the box of a Mr Morse, who apparently is on sabbatical. His son came round to pick up his mail this morning and found it had been put by mistake into his father’s slot.”

“What kind of letter?” asked Francis, and next to him, I could see that Henry had gone rigid. I followed his gaze, seeing he was staring, as though transfixed, at the papers in Julian’s hand. “Who’s it from?”

“Bunny,” Julian said, smiling at the stunned silence. “Well, of course, it’s not _really_ from Edmund. It’s a forgery, and not a very clever one…”

Whatever he said next was lost on me. I had finally seen what Henry had noticed. In Julian’s hand, a couple of the pages at the back of the pile had folded over and I could see the top half clearly. It was typewritten, upside-down, but it took me only seconds to recognise the letterhead, and I knew Henry must have recognised it instantly. 

It was the letterhead of the Excelsior, the hotel where Bunny and Henry had stayed in Rome. I glanced at him again. He was ashen. 

“It’s terribly sad that someone would want to play a trick like this,” Julian was saying, as I came back to the room again, still feeling lightheaded with panic. “I can’t imagine who would do such a thing.” 

He shook his head, and for a beat we were all silent, dumbfounded. I could barely stand it. Camilla was avoiding everyone’s eye; Francis was stunned, staring at Julian as though he thought he were having some kind of hallucination. 

Finally, Henry shifted in his seat. He seemed to gather himself before my eyes, and when he spoke his voice was steady, the way it always was in such earthshattering moments. For the first time, it brought me a sense of unease rather than calm.

“Julian,” he said, “would you mind awfully if I had a closer look at that?”


End file.
